Partnering for Improvement: 'Communities of Practice and Their Role in Scale Up.' Conference Paper

The past several decades have seen a substantial amount of time, resources, and expertise focused on producing sustainable improvement in schools at scale. Research on these efforts have highlighted how complex this challenge is, as it needs to attend to building teacher support and participation, aligning with the organizational context, and building capacity among stakeholders across organizational levels. In this paper, the authors describe their research across four phases. Their model of improvement relies on three core principles. First, a prototype is built to reflect the core elements of programs or practices that have been shown to be effective locally. Second, rapid-cycle testing is used to allow the prototype to be revised in ways that adapt it to a school or grade-level context. Third, the work occurs within a research-practice partnership (RPP) that strives to take advantage of local expertise, build local ownership to scale,and sustain effective practice (Cohen-Vogel et al., in press). By outlining the organizational structures established to enact the partnership and roles of the various partners, the authors provide an in-depth look at how one RPP operates. The authors begin by describing the concept of an improvement community as one type of RPP, identify several types of improvement communities currently operating in educational systems, and define the key features of improvement communities. Then, the authors outline the specific improvement communities that are central to the Center's work, highlighting how these structures help us enact their RPP. The authors end with their reflections about how the partnership created new roles for both researchers and practitioners as well as the challenges and opportunities that accompanied those new roles.